LEGALIZE HEMP; SUPPORT NEW BILL

I strongly urge you to support a new bill, AB 448, which reintroduces
industrial hemp production in California. We have many timber issues
facing our Sierra Nevada region. This seems a logical way to provide
for abundant tree-free resources to reduce the strain on our
embattled forests, with no net job losses. Hemp production would
preserve and create agricultural and manufacturing jobs. It can be
manufactured into a myriad of useful products and is easily farmed in
high density on even marginal soils and slopes. Even the waste
products are efficiently used as biomass for cogeneration energy
production, something California now desperately needs.

Hemp is successfully produced across Europe and Canada. It seems a
shame that we continue to declare illegal a harmless and useful
product that we then must import from other, more foresightful
nations. Our businesses must compete in the global market against
foreign companies with no restrictions on hemp production,
manufacture and sales. They profit from us, due to our archaic laws
based on 1930s-era corporate-manufactured propaganda.

That propaganda was created to ensure success of the new tree-pulp
paper process, which Dupont and Hearst had just patented. They
eliminated the only competition, hemp, by publishing false
drug-hysteria-laden news releases in Hearst's newspapers. These fake
articles were then submitted as the actual main evidence in
congressional hearings to ban hemp! It has been banned here for the
seven decades since.

Our state continues to face critical problems in employment,
sustainable forestry and energy production. Hemp production offers
cost-effective, plentiful solutions to address these and other
issues. The bill to reintroduce Industrial Hemp production in
California, AB 448, may be considered again by the California
Assembly on March 23. I urge you to give your fullest support to the
passage of this bill. Please contact our Assembly member Aanestad and
ask him to support AB448.

Beth Moore Haines

Chicago Park